How the Rankings Work

A player's rank is simply their place when everyone is sorted by rating, so "#2 / 50,701" means the second-highest rating out of every rated player. The rating itself comes from replaying every doubles set in the order it happened: wins raise it, losses lower it, and beating a stronger team is worth more than beating a weaker one.

Stopping ratings from inflating

A rating system like this has a known weak spot: a player can pile up points by beating weaker teams over and over without ever proving they can beat teams at their own level. DubsRank has a specific check for that.

For every player, the system looks at their sets against teams at their own level or better and compares two numbers: how often the rating model projected them to win those sets, and how often they actually won. A player whose rating is earned should win about as often as projected. A player who mostly farmed weaker opponents will fall well short.

When a player wins those sets less often than projected, their displayed rating is pulled down. When they win them more often than projected, it is nudged up. In other words, players are rewarded for holding a high win rate against similar or better competition, and a rating built only on beating lower-ranked players does not hold its place.

The safeguards on that check

It needs evidence. A player must have at least 8 sets against teams at their level or better before any adjustment is made, and the adjustment is heavily damped until they have many more. A player at the 8-set minimum gets under a third of the full adjustment; a veteran with hundreds of such sets gets nearly all of it.

It is capped. The adjustment can never move a rating by more than 150 points in either direction, so one bad run cannot wreck a ranking.

It covers a whole career. It is not a recent-form measure. An all-time great who kept winning against top teams is unaffected or rewarded.

Other things the ratings account for

Quality of wins matters throughout: the stronger the team you beat, the more a win is worth, and the bigger and deeper the tournament, the more its sets count. New players' ratings move faster until there is enough data to trust them, and players returning from a long break are allowed to move faster for a while too.

See About for how accurate the predictions are, and Skill Classes for what GrandMaster through Unranked mean.